This was a pretty packed weekend with diving on Saturday, then skiing in Whistler on Sunday. Boat dives in Howe Sound were always good, and I'm very glad I went on this one. Jason Kolba told me about it, and I signed up fairly last minute.
There was a break in the weather and Saturday was sunny. All the other days around it had been raining heavily. It sure was a nice break to be out on the water in the sun! It was almost like summer. Well, ok, not like summer because there was frost on the docks. But being able to gear up with no rain was a welcome change.
I was out on the Sea Dragon with IDC again for this dive. We got going a bit later than normal since we had to stop for fuel, but other than that, we got underway pretty quickly. Since it was cold and I was waiting around, I put on my undergarment and drysuit before getting on the boat. Having the extra room to manoeuvre was nice, and it gave some good protection from the wind.
We went to a new dive site off of the south west corner of Bowen Island called Wolcomb Island. I'm really not sure of that spelling, and I couldn't find the name on any online maps. It was a fairly small rocky island but had several nice houses on it. A google map link is here:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=49.347857,-123.45423&spn=0.000771,0.001966&t=h&z=19
The Sea Dragon dropped us in the water close to the rocks, and we swam up and down a wall that extended to the east. It was a very cool wall dive with tonnes of stuff to see. There were the biggest chimney/boot sponges I'd ever seen there. One had a mouth that was at least a foot and a half across. I stuck my light in the mouth of another one, and it lighted up like a Halloween pumpkin. There was also a puget sound king crab (he was small, not like the monsters near Port Hardy), a basket star, and a golf-ball crab (also known as a rhinoceros crab). This was the only spot you could find basket stars in Howe Sound. There were also some cool strawberry anemones that festooned the rocks that I'd never seen before. The wall was good down to below 25 metres for sure, and went quite a ways. Jason and I went back and forth along it three times. It was nice not having to worry about getting back to an up line, since the boat picked us up when we were done. It took some time to get to the dive site, but it was definitely worth it.
We headed back to the Whytecliff area for the next dive at Bird Islet. I had read about it in my dive book, but was very mistaken on its location. I had thought it was right beside Whytecliff when in fact it was a good distance south. There was a small rocky outcrop with a marker tower on it where a lot of birds rested (hence the name I guess!). Here is a google map link:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=49.354497,-123.278886&spn=0.001541,0.003916&t=h&z=18
The Sea Dragon crew said that Bird Islet was one of their favourite dive sites, but boat traffic and currents made it not always good to go to. Today it was good though, with very little current. We dropped into the water by the islet, and followed the wall that went out to the south. It was a good dive for sure. We came across a crevice with a giant pacific octopus, and a huge school of some kind of rockfish. There was almost no current, so it was a very relaxing pleasant dive. There were huge numbers of white plumose anemones, along with some rose anemones too. There was also a chubby sea star that I need to look up the name of. Finally, there was a really cool nudibranch hanging out in the open. On the ascent, I really should have deployed my surface marker buoy. Partly for practice, but mostly for reference since we were mid-water. It would have made keeping our depth less variable on our safety stop a lot easier. Next time.
The diving was over far too soon unfortunately. Good thing I had another boat dive planned for the 31st!
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